And for soccer (er, football) fans in the US, Fox Sports will be the TV network responsible for bringing them all 64 games from Russia, at least if they want to watch them in English. But, beyond its broadcast offerings, Fox Sports wants to keep people engaged in the competition in different ways. Aside from its partnership with Twitter, which comes in the form of a show that'll stream live from Russia, Fox Sports has teamed up with IBM to build the ultimate World Cup highlight machine. Powered by Watson artificial intelligence, this video hub lets you create on-demand clips from every FIFA World Cup tournament dating back to 1958. Fox Sports says there are 300 archived matches that Watson is capable of analyzing, which you can filter out by World Cup year, team, player, game, play type or any combination of these.

IBM has laid off a number of employees in its Watson Health unit, but says initial reports that as much as 50 percent to 70 percent of the unit's workforce was furloughed are not accurate and that the reductions will not hurt its core cognitive computing business. A company representative, however, would not provide additional details or give the specific number of employees being let go. The company also refused to say how many people are employed in the Watson Health unit. "IBM is continuing to reposition our team to focus on the high-value segments of the IT market, and we continue to hire aggressively in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM," said the vendor in a written statement. "This activity affects a small percentage of our Watson Health workforce, as we move to more technology-intensive offerings, simplified processes and automation to drive speed."

IBM has laid off a number of employees in its Watson Health unit, but says initial reports that as much as 50 percent to 70 percent of the unit's workforce was furloughed are not accurate and that the reductions will not hurt its core cognitive computing business. A company representative, however, would not provide additional details or give the specific number of employees being let go. The company also refused to say how many people are employed in the Watson Health unit. "IBM is continuing to reposition our team to focus on the high-value segments of the IT market, and we continue to hire aggressively in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM," said the vendor in a written statement. "This activity affects a small percentage of our Watson Health workforce, as we move to more technology-intensive offerings, simplified processes and automation to drive speed."

Artificial intelligence may seem futuristic, but smart brands are already focusing on creating practical, measurable consumer-facing applications with the technology. Brand and agency leaders are using this new technology for everything from shifting how media dollars are deployed, to customer service, to using artificial intelligence for content creation. Competitors enter and stakes rise. And consumers expect more from the companies they buy from. It is not about just being the most convenient option, or the cheapest option.

Their conversation focuses on Watson Services for Core ML, which allows developers to build Watson Machine Learning models in the cloud and deploy applications on Apple iOS devices. IBM Watson Services allows developers to build applications and let Watson do the heavy lifting when it comes to AI and Machine Learning. Watson Studio--with its simple steps and drag-and-drop features--allows developers to create models without being Machine Learning experts. Sridhar discusses how this enables users, developers, and businesses to build better applications. The bottom line is that putting Watson in your pocket is a big deal.

Apple recently announced their partnership with IBM to leverage IBM's Watson service to train machine learning models for CoreML. So that mean you now can build apps that leverage Watson machine learning models on iPhone and iPad, even when your device is offline. Your apps can quickly analyze images, accurately classify visual content, and easily train models using Watson Services. With this video series you will learn to onboard with not only pre-trained Watson models but customize and train models that continuously learn over time. In Apple's own words "You can build apps that seamlessly integrate with IBM Cloud using the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple. This allows you to quickly tap into Watson Services for Core ML, as well as other IBM cloud services including authentication, data, analytics, and more. The console provides a catalog of starter kits designed for common frameworks that integrate with IBM Cloud."

IBM has laid off approximately 50 and 70 per cent of staff this week in its Watson Health division, according to inside sources. The axe, we're told, is largely falling on IBMers within companies the IT goliath has taken over in the past few years to augment Watson's credentials in the health industry. These include medical data biz Truven, which was acquired in 2016 for $2.6bn, medical imaging firm Merge, bought in 2015 for $1bn, and healthcare management business Phytel, also snapped up in 2015. Yesterday and today, staff were let go at IBM's offices in Dallas, Texas, as well as in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado, in the US, and elsewhere, it is claimed. A spokesperson for Big Blue was not available for comment.

When dealing with audio files a lot of work is required to index them properly so that is easy to lookup for them when needed. In this example we'll show how to use IBM Watson Speech to Text to recognize speech from audio files stored on Box and enrich their metadata with the extracted text. Go to Service Credentials and copy the username & password values, we're going to use them soon. In less then 1 minute you can have this up and running by using the project Blueprint, a pre-built template to help you get started with proven integration solutions. To get started with the Blueprint just click here.

Recently I've been working on a customer service chatbot based on IBM Watson Assistant (formerly known as "IBM Watson Conversation Service") for a large Austrian telecommuncation provider. The chatbot was trained to answer questions on the website and to lead the user to the right website section. It currently handles 60k-80k conversations per months and covers 25% of the customer service interactions. It happened several times that minor changes in the dialog design or training caused previously working dialogs to fail -- so we were in need of regression testing. With Botium it was possible to generate test cases from the IBM Watson Assistant workspace and setup automated testing within some minutes.

Watson services on IBM Cloud are a set of REST APIs. This makes them quite simple to be used as a piece of a solution within an application. It also means they need to be integrated with various other parts of the solution to allow your users to interact with your instance of Watson. With the launch of Watson Assistant, integrating with other channels (Facebook, Slack, Intercom) has never been easier. Building a skill for Alexa is possible with Watson.